Saturday, January 29, 2011


What does it take? British criminal gets 578th conviction but has never been sent to prison

A man with a 50-year record of crime has been spared jail despite being found guilty of his 578th offence. The case led an MP yesterday to describe the criminal justice system as a ‘joke’.

The serial offender is one of thousands given community sentences every year for crimes including violence and sex attacks, despite having been convicted or cautioned more than 50 times before. The number in this category has increased by a quarter in a year.

The appalling statistics are seen as proof that the justice system is failing to tackle career criminals who repeatedly avoid being locked away.

Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt revealed the case of the man with 578 offences in response to a parliamentary question by Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley. He refused to give any details about the offender or his crimes.

Mr Davies said: ‘This shows that the criminal justice system has become a joke. ‘Even Crispin Blunt has said that prison should be there not just for serious offenders, but for persistent offenders as well. ‘Surely when someone has committed so many crimes, somebody somewhere should say this man is a serious offender? ‘Whatever he has done, this man is surely a menace to the community and it beggars belief that he can commit 578 crimes and still not be sent to prison.

‘And of course, these are only crimes that are detected. ‘We are probably talking of thousands of crimes here. It shows that, despite what (Justice Secretary) Ken Clarke would have us believe, we have too few people in prison, not too many.’

David Green, of the think-tank Civitas, said: ‘I have long argued that career criminals should be jailed for a long period, because they have no respect for the rights and obligations of normal life. ‘We all accept that prison should not be something we resort to too quickly. ‘We would all like to be given a second chance if we do something stupid – it’s the 578th chance I have a problem with.’

SOURCE




Muslims charged over 'gay excution leaflet' in first British 'sexual hatred' case

Two men are due to appear in court charged with stirring up hatred due to sexual orientation in the first such case in Britain. Razwan Javed, 30, and Kabir Ahmed, 27, are to appear before magistrates in Derby accused of handing out leaflets calling for homosexuals to be executed. It is the first prosecution since laws outlawing homophobia came into force last March.

The pair were yesterday charged with distributing the leaflet, titled “The Death Penalty?”, outside the Jamia Mosque in Derby in July last year. They are also accused of placing the leaflets through local letterboxes during the same month, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

The pair, who were arrested after a tip-off from the public, have been charged with distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

They face a maximum sentence of seven years’ jail and and/or an unlimited fine if convicted at a crown court. No other details of the offences were released.

"We have... authorised Derbyshire Police to charge Razwan Javed, 30, and Kabir Ahmed, 27, with one count each of distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation," said CPS lawyer Sue Hemming. "The charges relate to the distribution of a leaflet, 'The Death Penalty?', outside the Jamia Mosque in Derby in July 2010 and through letterboxes during the same month.

"This is the first ever prosecution for this offence and it is the result of close working between the Crown Prosecution Service and Derbyshire Police." “Following complaints from the public, Derbyshire Police mounted a thorough investigation.”

She added: “We have carefully reviewed the evidence provided by the police and are satisfied that there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to charge these men.”

The Public Order Act 1986 was amended by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

SOURCE





Fury over Lauda call for ban on gay TV dancers

AUSTRIAN gay groups have demanded an apology from the former racing driver Niki Lauda after he made disparaging remarks about the pairing of a gay celebrity with a male dancer on a television dance program.

Alfons Haider, a 53-year-old television presenter from Vienna, is set to waltz with another man in the forthcoming series of Dancing Stars on the state-owned ORF channel.

Mr Lauda, 61, the three-times world formula one champion, told the Austrian daily Oesterreich he did not want to have to explain to his children why two men were dancing together on prime-time TV. "There are some good traditions in our culture, one of which is that men dance with women," he said. "Soon we will reach the stage where we will all have to publicly apologise for being heterosexual."

The German tabloid Bild asked Mr Lauda if it was really so bad for two men to dance together. "No," he said. "As long as they do it at home and not on TV, when children are watching."

He insisted he was not homophobic and that he would not mind at all if his son was gay. He employed "loads" of gay people on his airline, Niki, "even as instructors", he added.

Christian Hogl, the chairman of the Vienna gay rights group HOSI, said: "We are really shocked and very surprised that Mr Lauda harbours such prejudice against homosexuals to make such an unjustified attack." The group has invited Mr Lauda to the city's Rainbow Ball next month to educate him about homosexuality.

Dancing Stars is due to start in March, but Mr Lauda said: "I demand that the general director [of ORF], Alex Wrabetz, who is in an upright marriage, stops this gay dance number." Mr Wrabetz said: "I don't chose Mr Lauda's pilots and he doesn't choose our dancers."

SOURCE





The psychopathology of anti-Israel discourse

Some belief systems, as Jared Loughner demonstrated, are beyond politics and logic. Everyone seems to agree that Loughner, who went on a shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing bystanders, was an unfortunate schizophrenic suffering from incoherent ideation. But what if there was a whole Loughnerism movement? What if they taught this sort of thinking at universities, and it was believed by respectable people?

On what must have been a pleasant autumn evening, a group of moderately educated young people met and discussed favorably the following propositions:

* The Red Cross is a bad organization because it is neutral. Neutral organizations are bad.

* The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sexist document.

* The Middle East peace process is bad for the Arab Palestinians.

* Foreign aid is bad for the Palestinians.

* The sure path to liberation of the Catholic Philippines and gay people is to join the cause of Muslim extremism and wipe out Jewish self- determination. Only Zionism stands in the way of liberation of these oppressed peoples.

* Bad people are always white and probably Zionist. Good people are colored and are therefore oppressed.

This meeting did not take place in the closed ward of a mental institution or in Kim Il Sung University in PyongYang, People’s Republic of Korea, but in an American University campus financed by the state of California. The attendees were undergraduates and graduate students, America’s leaders of tomorrow.

The “teach-in” was sponsored by an improbable coalition of Muslims, Filipino Catholics and gay people.

A very broad coalition supports this sort of Loughnerism. Perhaps Loughner’s only misfortune is that he did not focus on “Zionists” – he could have had massive support. The Quakers (“Friends”) of course were (nonviolently) in favor of genocide and the Hamas, against the peace process and the Red Cross.

BAYAN, in case you are wondering, is a Filipino organization, reputedly a communist front, possibly associated with Filipino Muslims.. Evidently, they convinced themselves that Teddy Roosevelt was a Zionist, that the Spanish monarchy was Jewish or Zionist, and that it is the Jews (“Zionists”) (who else?) who are responsible for the current ills of their homeland.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews. If the students meant to give the Jews a different horizon for national liberation, they did not say so. Filipino nationalism and Arab Palestinian are good according to the students, Jewish nationalism is evil, because, one supposes, Jews are supposed to be evil.

They all seemed to agree, as usual, that thrashing the Kikes would save their cause:

… the center of all our work has to be fighting against Zionism –

…. The end goal is the end to Zionism that should be the end goal.

And unless that is the focus and center of your activism and organizing when it comes to Palestine and joint struggle and solidarity then there’s a problem, because that really is the key to ending, or the goal to liberation also of Palestinians is the ending of Zionism…

If you aren’t interested in whacking the Jews, these people don’t want your help.

That was the comparatively coherent part. It unmasks the various sponsors (including the Quakers, who may as well remove their pacifist masks) for what they are. It shows, for any who may have doubted, what the struggle is about: genocide and hate mongering.

Here is a bit more:

Barack Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the U.S. is “white.” White is bad. The Jews (“Zionists) must be part of the evil plot, right? Where do gay people and Quakers fit in? It doesn’t matter, right? It makes no difference that the young people in this auditorium never saw Hamas leader Ismail Hanniyeh, who is white, or his Jewish Ethiopian victims. Logic is bourgeois, facts are for pedants, right? The important thing is for American students in an American University who never did any useful work and never suffered in any way to rail against white oppression, right? The struggle is the important thing, right?

It is hard to understand why gay people and Filipino activists, possibly communists, would believe that their own cause could somehow be bettered by “ending Zionism” and furthering the advance of radical Islamism - but it seems that they do.

Young people, who have mostly never seen a real live Zionist, never lived in a Muslim country and have little background information about the Philippines or the Middle East, might accept these doctrines as valid. The reasoning behind them is no better or worse than that of Pol Pot or Ulrike Meinhoff or Mao Tse Tung, but those doctrines were after all believed by millions, and they got “results.” Pohl Pot killed three million people in Cambodia. Ulrike Meinhof left a trail of victims and a cult of people who justified her “ideology,” Mao Tse Tung killed about 20 billion in China.

Next to these masters, Jared Loughner, who killed a small number of people in Arizona, was a pathetic failure. It was not his fault. He was not more illogical than the successful ideologists. He didn’t understand how to market his product and make it chic. He did not target “Zionists.” Therefore he was disowned and derided as insane. If Loughner had killed a respectable number of people, and if he had been backed by petrodollar-funded public relations, he would no doubt be written up by Time magazine as an anti-Zionist hero. At the very least, he would be given a column somewhere.

The gathering at Berkeley was a “teach in” in which the young attendees absorbed a way of thinking and a set of doctrines that would otherwise be the subject of psychiatric analysis. When one person thinks this way, he is isolated as a psychopath. When groups of people think this way, they have an “ideology.” It is organized and funded. The “ideology” of the teach-in will not be confined to eccentric student groups. Graduate students grow into professors, journalists and officials. Professors write texts. Officials make policy. Journalists determine how you perceive reality. Today’s student yahoo yelling incoherently about oppression is tomorrow’s authoritative opinion maker and policy maker.

What do these groups and their members have in common? The world is full of Jared Loughners. The do not really have a coherent picture of geography or politics. They hate. They fear. But some are more coherent than others. They can provide a voice, organize a demonstration, get weapons. Groups like these provide a warm home for the Jared Loughners of the world.

The Loughnerization of thought processes about Israel has been going on for years. It did not begin just now in Berkeley. The teach-in in Berkeley may be viewed as a dress rehearsal for the special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly that will be held in September 2011 in New York, to commemorate the Durban “anti-Racism” conference.

The Berkeley Loughnerites and many others will no doubt send delegations as well. If not, they will be there in spirit, right? All the big names in Middle East Loughnerism will probably be there, including Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Jared Loughner. Think of the possibilities. Imagine if Loughner had an atom bomb instead of a lousy Glock!

More HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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